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China’s Social Media Platform Weibo to Enhance Online Copyright Protection by Using Blockchain

In the middle of April, Wang Gaofei, CEO of Sina Weibo, one of China’s most popular social media platforms, claimed at the Penn Wharton China Summit that weibo has joined in a cross-platform copyrights protection system which is powered by blockchain technology. This initiative marks that a new China’s tech giant starts to ride the blockchain wave following BATJ (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and JD.com).

In his speech, Wang highlighted that “Weibo has not replaced traditional media, but has expanded media’s social arrangements in the real world to create a virtuous circle in the Internet world.” During the media interviews, Wang provided detailed answers to public concerns over the composition of Weibo’s newly-built ecosystem, the further protection of intellectual property rights protection through the internet, and how to check the authenticity of “self-media” content.

When asked about how did the DCI(Data, Context, and Interaction) system center work by a journalist, he said that Weibo has recently cooperated with the Copyright Protection Center of China to launch the DIC system, which is powered by blockchain technology.

“Some original content platforms in China have formed a blockchain coalition, using private blockchain, to enable users to become content owners. Thus, these platforms are able to track content creators and the cross-platform copyrights protection will be justified.” Wang said.

The DCI system is a trial adopted by several large content platforms now, but more platforms are expected to join in the future. Weibo is among the first batch of platforms to be included in the system.

Besides, Wang added that China has improved the protection of intellectual property rights, especially in the film and TV drama fields. But the lack of respect for copyrights is still a significant problem to social media platforms which feature pictures and texts, such as Weibo, Wechat and Zhihu, because it is not easy to register copyrights in current system. But with the arrival with blockchian, this problem can be addressed now.